


The Strangest of Places (The lacrimosa dies illa Remix)

by amyfortuna



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Community: remix_redux, Gen, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-11
Updated: 2007-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 03:59:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/pseuds/amyfortuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor ends the Time War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Strangest of Places (The lacrimosa dies illa Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [XWingAce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/XWingAce/gifts).



> Written for the Remix Challenge. Author and URL of original story: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2814363/1/ - This Strange Place by XWingAce

In later years he would say it was because he had been alone for so long. Time after time he had faced the Daleks while the Time Lords hid their heads. When they finally emerged from the sand, started up the battle in earnest, they still found fit to send the Doctor to do all their dirty work, the things they wouldn’t sully themselves with.

He was sent to Arcadia, not a planet but a system, full of innocents. None of them were Gallifreyan, none of them were Daleks. None of them were even allied with either camp.

He was there to fight, guerilla warfare at its sneakiest, there to spy, to find the secrets of the Daleks and bring them back to Gallifrey.

But he was alone. He did not, could have not, brought any human with him. Many had faced danger with him, but he had lives to spare, they did not, simple as that.

The Doctor, reliant upon the TARDIS and its renowned ability to slip past enemy radar, hid themselves within the Dalek base.

There he discovered the greatest secret of the Daleks, new technology beyond anything that the Time Lords possessed.

The Daleks called it a ‘Time Bomb’, and, horrifically, it was modeled on Gallifreyan tech, an innocent system that originally was simply used for looking into alternative universes, seeing not only what was, but what might have been.

This though — this infernal machine, twisted and changed history, and could wipe out a million species with the touch of a button.

There was one particular feature the Doctor found most intriguing. It operated by remote control. The being who pressed the button would find himself and all those near encompassed in a time bubble as the ripples of the time stream passed over them. The machine could only be used once as it would be destroyed by the very mechanisms it put into motion.

The Doctor stole the remote, sliding it into his pocket in the inside of his coat alongside the sonic screwdriver.

They had other ways of setting it off, but none that could be done on a whim.

It wasn’t until the Daleks destroyed Arcadia’s First Planet that the Doctor began to consider the possibility of using the Time Bomb himself. The ancient and noble civilisation of the Acarri people was wiped from existence in a few seconds, and the Daleks showed no signs of stopping there.

The Doctor called home, but they had no answers in Gallifrey. They were shoring up their defenses, waiting for the Daleks to come to them, sending only a few of their best soldiers out to take any sort of proactive stance.

Even after he explained for what must have been the thousandth time that the Daleks would not stop until every species except themselves was wiped from time and space, they said they would do nothing.

Then the Doctor began to consider the possibility of the Time Bomb in earnest.

The bomb changed the future depending on where it was set off from. Setting it off in the middle of a galaxy might well destroy all life there (or make it completely unrecognisable). Setting it off in a different place might well be the end of just one or two species.

The Doctor did every calculation to find that magical location that would mean the Daleks would be the only race destroyed.

There was no such place.

The best he could do was find a place to set the bomb off that would wipe the existence of two races, the Daleks and the Time Lords, those forever rivals in space and time, and now even in death going down struggling together.

So it was there, in that strangest of places, on Planet Earth, in the year 5237 BCE, he set the TARDIS down in the country of what would later be Wales, near the sea, in a place that would later be called Cardiff.

He stepped out of the TARDIS for one last look at the trees and the blue sky. Here, far from the war and its ravages, a small stream bubbled through the grass and underbrush of the forest.

Birds sang overhead in the deep warmth of a summer afternoon, and the tiny brook babbled cheerfully. The Doctor sat for several long moments on a fallen log, staring into the water with all the focus of a man about to die.

A call from Gallifrey got his attention, and he went back into the TARDIS, watching in silence as the Time Lords informed him that the situation was critical, the Daleks were moving in towards Gallifrey, hundreds of species dying in their wake, and any moment now, the entire galaxy would suffer death at their hands. They concluded with an eloquent plea for the Doctor to do something, anything, to save the universe.

“All right,” the Doctor said, removing the remote from his coat pocket. “But you won’t like it.”

He switched off the communicator, leaving them with those words, resisting the desire to fly back home himself and die with them. The TARDIS rose into the air, high above the very spot he had landed on, so high he was beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Here was the perfect spot, the planned location.

Turning the remote in his hand, he took a moment to just look at it. Time Lord technology, corrupted by the Daleks, twisted by the Daleks.

And an emotion rose up in him, one he was unused to feeling.

It was hate. Pure and simple hate, so powerful tears sprang up in his eyes.

And on the well of that emotion, he pressed the button.

Light seared his eyes, and his tears turned into a scream. As he fell to the floor of the TARDIS, the existence of everything turned from light to dark. Time stopped, twisted, turned back on itself. A great rift tore into the Earth at the exact location the TARDIS hovered above.

But all he felt at that moment was a great relief.

It was done.

It might have been the next moment, or a thousand more of them, before pain registered itself on his consciousness and the fact that the death he had died was not permanent became apparent.

Everything was changed, and everything was empty inside his mind. The Time Lords were gone, as if they had never been, leaving only himself as heir.


End file.
